On 4/21/07, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
Because something doesn't meet our fair use rules does not make it a copyright violation, and you may really annoy someone by accusing them so.
Sorry for my ambiguity, by "copyvio" in this context I meant "violation of copyright policy" rather than "copyright law" necessarily. Point taken, I will rethink my choice of words.
The point still stands that I am disappointed that the user who removed these dozens of fair use abuse images was be blocked as a suspected bot and mass-reverted as a suspected vandal, because the community reached an ad hoc decision that these images were "legitimate fair use".
On 4/21/07, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
In many cases, the rules have changed since they were promoted to admin.
Probably true, but not for this case. Of the three admins I quoted above, two were promoted last month, one of them in August 2006. The first sentence of fair use criterion #1 "No free equivalent is available or could be created that would adequately give the same information" has not seen any changes during those eight months.
2006-08-01 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Non-free_content_criteri... 2007-04-21 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Non-free_content_criteri...
However, I would suggest that the RFA process does not evaluate a user's understanding of policy as well as it should (though it is arguably a good measure of popularity, niceness, edit summary usage, and things like that). Thoughts?
Charlotte